‘Miss Curvy’ will embarrass the country

UGANDA

Editorial

Daily Monitor

In the eyes of Uganda’s tourism ministry, women aren’t people, said the Daily Monitor. Instead, they’re just another tourist attraction to be featured in a brochure, like Uganda’s scenic lakes and mountains, or its chimpanzees and baboons. Tourism Minister Godfrey Kiwanda has announced a new beauty pageant, “Miss Curvy,” which will be held in June to promote Uganda’s most voluptuous citizens in what he hopes will be a boon to tourism. As Kiwanda sees it, Uganda is naturally endowed with sexy women, so “why can’t we grab this God-given opportunity and use them as a strategy to promote our tourism industry”? He even brought out some of the more curvaceous pageant contestants to serve as eye candy for his plan’s big rollout. But these women weren’t being honored, they were being exploited. Women are already objectified too much in Uganda, where more than 60 percent of the capital offenses prosecuted are for sexual assaults. The Miss Curvy campaign “dehumanizes women” by “putting them at the same level with animals” or commodities. It’s not too late to drop the whole idea. Parading plus-size women around as objects for foreign lust “reminds the country of the long-forgotten slave trade.”